Blog Archive

Introducing Developer Central and the Developer Exchange

October

01, 2013

We have really exciting news to share with you today. We at ROBLOX are putting much effort into enabling, encouraging, and rewarding our developers and creators — and we think you’ve only scratched the surface of what can be done. Today we’re launching Developer Central, a hub on ROBLOX.com for all things development-oriented.

You’ll find Developer Central on the Develop page, which has replaced Build in the main navigation bar. The Develop page is similar to the Build page, but will be home in the coming weeks and months to a variety of developer-centric features, such as metrics that provide insight into how your creations are performing (how many visits? how long do people play?), special forums, toolkits, tips about what successful games do well, and more.

One of the first pieces of Developer Central is our Developer Exchange, or DevEx. In an effort to give our community further incentive to create fantastic games, DevEx lets successful developers exchange the ROBUX they earn for real-world currency. DevEx can be accessed from a tab on the Develop page.

As you can see, there are a few requirements that need to be met in order to participate. First, you need to have earned at least 100,000 ROBUX. You can cash this amount out at $100.00 USD. The cap is set at 500,000 ROBUX (or $500.00 USD). We anticipate adding additional participation levels in the future. Second, you need to have a PayPal account, as this is how earnings will be paid out. You also need to have verified your e-mail address with ROBLOX.

Finally, you need to be an Outrageous Builders Club member. While we’re not ready to reveal many specific details just yet (we’re contemplating additional features such as special access to ROBLOX engineers through dedicated forums and chat, perhaps a developer program-only test environment, and more), OBC is going to be transitioning to a developer-centric membership program; DevEx is a key feature of that program. It’s entirely possible that successful developers could use the Developer Exchange to pay for their OBC membership and still have plenty of cash left. If you qualify, you can participate in DevEx once each calendar month.

Big picture, we think this will give our builders and developers incentive to not only create stellar games and places on ROBLOX but also help them see serious ROBLOX game development for what it really is: a job. If you’re producing some of the top content on ROBLOX, you deserve to be compensated for your work. That’s a core idea behind DevEx. We’ll be bringing you more news about Developer Central and our Developer Program as it, um, develops.

We’ll also make be sure to highlight Developer Exchange success stories whenever possible. Imagine a power-user cashes out and buys a car to get to and from college–all from developing a popular game on ROBLOX. This is the kind of story we can’t wait to tell.